pssst.. A little hack, Find the Best Pictures for Your Tourism Website

The professional photos and stock photos that you display with pride on your website are an important part of advertising your tours and activities. It’s pivotal that you showcase people having fun on your tours with action-packed, high-resolution, vivid and colorful photographs, but these aren’t the most important visual media elements when it comes to promoting your tour and activity brand online.

In fact, the most important photos are not taken or commissioned by you at all. The photos that will define your tour and activity company online are the photos that your customers post on their own Instagram and Facebook feeds.

These photos showcase the tour highlights, based on the preferences and opinions of actual customers. Known as earned media, these photos can be some of the most useful marketing materials that you have at your disposal.. The problem is that these photos can be difficult to find — or at least, they used to be difficult to find. That’s why we wanted to offer you a tip!

PSSSTT.. A Little Hack

Visit Gramfeed.com in order to search for photos on Instagram based on location. Narrow down the search results in order to discover the photos that your customers have posted while on your tours. Now you can start promoting the actual experiences that your customers enjoy (you might want to give credit or contact the Instagram user). By displaying earned media, you’ll increase the trust your new customers have in your brand.

A Few Reasons Why You Should Value Earned Media

Your conversion rates will increase. In fact, some research shows that traditional media yield conversion rates of less than 1 percent, but earned media can increase your conversion rate up to 5 percent.

Earned media isn’t going to disappear. A word-of-mouth recommendation can easily be lost or forgotten, but as everyone knows, nothing disappears once it’s on the Internet. Earned media is indexed and searchable, and will continue to be discovered by people who are interested in your products and searching for results in your destination.

People trust earned media far more than they trust paid advertising. Research shows that when a trusted friend recommends a particular product — either through word-of-mouth or online — they are 50 times more likely to make the purchase than if they had just heard about it through an ad campaign.

You can track your earned media results easily. There are many different tools and resources available to help calculate the quantity of photos and videos that are posted as well as the quality of those postings.

Improving your social media presence and encouraging customers to post photos on Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites is just one way to boost your brand’s online presence. Your website also should be a top priority, and you should work continuously to enhance it. Download the Rezdy checklist today, and start working on these easy improvements to your website that will drive more business and increase your direct bookings!